Earlier this week Swedish police raided a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex in the city of Nacka.

The target of the raid was The Pirate Bay but collateral damage caused several other torrent sites to go down as well. This included EZTV, the go-to place for many torrenting TV fans.

After nearly two days of downtime EZTV is slowly starting to crawl back up. TF spoke to the EZTV crew who confirmed that several servers are up and running again and that the site’s services are coming back online.

At the time of writing the main site is still offline. However, the upload bots are back in action and EZTV torrents are being uploaded again in other places such as Kickass.so and ExtraTorrent.

In addition, EZTV proxies such as eztv-proxy.net can now connect to the site’s backend IP-addresses. This means that these are showing new uploads again, as can be seen below.

EZTV recovers

During the days to come EZTV hopes to recover fully and continue business as usual from the main EZTV.it domain.

For Pirate Bay users there is no positive news to report yet. The site remains offline and there are no indications that it will return in the near future.

There are several unofficial mirror sites that still work, but these have nothing to do with a possible comeback. These sites provide a minimal archive of old torrents, but there’s no new content being added as these all lack an upload feature.

For now, many estranged Pirate Bay users seem to be flocking to other popular torrent sites. ExtraTorrent informed TF that they saw a 90 percent surge in user signups following the raid, while the number of downloads increased by a third.

Most other sites that were hit by the raid remain offline. These include Torrage, the Istole tracker and Pirate Bay’s forum Suprbay. Torrent storage servie Zoink has fully recovered.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In recent years The Pirate Bay took several steps to make the site as resilient as possible, moving from a full-fledged BitTorrent tracker to a trimmed-down and highly portable torrent index.

The infamous torrent site canceled nearly all central servers and moved most of its operation to the cloud, where it ran on 21 virtual machines scattered over several commercial cloud hosting providers.

Yesterday, however, the site was pulled offline with a single raid at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex. Despite various rumors of TPB reincarnations there is still no sign that the site will return anytime soon.

So how can it be that The Pirate Bay was taken down despite all the time and effort that went into making its setup raid proof?

TF has been speaking with various people familiar with the matter and one of the most likely scenarios emerging is that the site’s loadbalancer was hit by the raid. This has been one of the remaining bottlenecks for TPB in recent years and the cause of previous downtime.

If this theory holds true it should be possible for the site to recover quickly if a new loadbalancer with the right setup is put in place. After all, the virtual machines are not centrally hosted and should be up and running.

How long it will take to connect these to the Internet remains guesswork for now, if it happens at all.

At the moment it’s still unknown what Pirate Bay-related hardware was seized during the raid. The Pirate Bay team previously stressed, however, that everything is encrypted in case it falls into the wrong hands.

On the human front, the police arrested one member of the Pirate Bay crew yesterday. The identity of this person hasn’t been confirmed, but if it’s one of the people with access to the site’s crucial infrastructure it will further complicate any possible comeback.

Another concern is that the people running TPB and other sites affected by the raid are also remaining quiet. The popular TV-torrent site EZTV remains offline too and thus far the operator is not commenting on the situation.

Meanwhile, most other torrent sites are seeing a spike in traffic from Pirate Bay users looking for a new home. TorrentReactor and other large torrent sites inform TF that there’s an increase in traffic of between 5 and 10 percent at the moment.

After the first raid in 2006 it took The Pirate Bay three days to recover, making a blazing comeback as “The Police Bay.” There’s not long left to beat that record.

Update: Just to be clear, thepiratebay.ee, thepiratebay.cr, thepiratebay.mobi and others are mirrors not affiliated with the original site. They serve old content (no new uploads) and are not TPB resurrections. If the site reappears it will be on the original .se domain.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

BitTorrent Inc. announced a new project today, a web browser with the ambition of making the Internet “people powered.”

Project Maelstrom, as it’s called, is in the very early stages of development but BitTorrent Inc. is gearing up to send out invites for a closed Alpha test.

The company hasn’t released a feature set as yet, but it’s clear that the browser will serve websites and other content through users.

According to BitTorrent Inc. this can not only speed up websites but also boost people’s privacy. In addition, it should be capable of bypassing website blockades and other forms of censorship.

“If we are successful, we believe this project has the potential to help address some of the most vexing problems facing the Internet today,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker notes.

“How can we keep the Internet open? How can we keep access to the Internet neutral? How can we better ensure our private data is not misused by large companies? How can we help the Internet scale efficiently for content?”

The idea for a BitTorrent powered browser is not new. The Pirate Bay started work on a related project a few months ago with the aim of keeping the site online even if its servers were raided.

The project hasn’t been released yet, although it would have come in handy today.

Interestingly, BitTorrent’s brief summary of how the browser will work sounds a lot like Pirate Bay’s plans. The company shared the following details with Gigaom.

“It works on top of the BitTorrent protocol. Websites are published as torrents and Maelstrom treats them as first class citizens instead of just downloadable content. So if a website is contained within a torrent we treat it just like a normal webpage coming in over HTTP.”

More details are expected to follow during the months to come. Those interested in Project Maelstrom can sign up for an invite to the Alpha test here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A few weeks ago Peter Sunde was released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence for his involvement in The Pirate Pay.

Peter is one of the few people who paid the ultimate price of sacrificing his freedom for the site but he isn’t mourning its recent troubles. In fact, Sunde would prefer it if the site shut down permanently.

TF spoke with Peter this morning and he told us that the site has long since served its purpose.

TPB’s main aim was to bring BitTorrent to the masses, a goal that was completed years ago. According to Peter the site has gone downhill in recent years up to a point where it turned into a soulless cash cow.

Peter, often referred to as one of Pirate Bay’s co-founders, wrote about his sentiments in a recent blog post.

“The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them,’ he writes.

The Pirate Bay was founded as a platform to allow people to share and copy whatever they want without restrictions. However, in recent years very little progress was made, Peter notes.

“The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old designs. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse.”

The former Pirate Bay spokesman is happy to see the site on its knees. After it was handed over to the new crew a few years ago the site lost its soul, he believes.

That said, Peter regrets that it has gone down like this. The plan had always been to pull the plug after 10 years, so others could take over. However, when that day came last year the site remained online.

“A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that has a soul and can retain it,” Peter notes.

This sentiment is not really new. Peter and others argued the same in the past.

The big question that remains right now is whether The Pirate Bay will make another comeback, or if this is indeed the end. Peter seems to believe that the latter may be the case, but that others will fill the gap.

“From the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There are already other services for that,” Peter concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There hasn’t been this much panic in the file-sharing world since 2006. Back then the cause was a huge police raid that targeted The Pirate Bay in its Swedish homeland. Now, eight years later, it’s deja vu all over again.

As everyone knows by now, yesterday morning Swedish police raided a data center in Nacka, Stockholm. A little time later The Pirate Bay disappeared offline and late last evening anti-piracy group Rights Alliance took responsibility for the complaint that forced the site offline.

In the hours that followed dozens of news reports appeared, most of which accurately reported the facts so far. However, several outlets, Sydney Morning Herald included, reported overnight that The Pirate Bay was in the process of being resurrected at a brand new domain.

The domain mentioned in most of the reports is the Costa Rica based ThePirateBay.cr. As can be seen from the screenshot below, it does indeed look like The Pirate Bay.

Only adding to the excitement (or perhaps causing it), plenty of posts appeared on Reddit trumpeting this domain as the site’s new home. Sadly, however, these reports are wide of the mark.

ThePirateBay.cr is a Pirate Bay proxy/mirror service (it’s listed by Proxybay) and as such relies entirely on The Pirate Bay for its torrent content. Currently it has none. The site appears to be operating out of the Netherlands and only became widely available in October.

While admittedly quite popular in India (it recently became its 1,349th most popular site according to Alexa, already people are proclaiming the .CR domain as the new Pirate Bay. In fact, someone has already begun marketing a range of t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, posters and greetings cards carrying the site’s name.

The confusion appears to stem from the fact that some “proxy” homepages stay up even when The Pirate Bay goes down as they cache some content. As can be seen from the screenshot below, another proxy ‘labaia.me‘ displays just fine, but then does nothing when the user attempts to find torrents.

While still in the early hours following the shutdown, there’s nothing to suggest that The Pirate Bay’s domains have fallen into the hands of the authorities. This suggests that if the site does reappear, it will do so via one of its existing domains, although that position is certainly open to change.

In the meantime users should be cautious of sites claiming to be “the new Pirate Bay”. While most probably just want to get some traffic, there could be others with more nefarious ideas in mind.

Update: Apparently the commercialism doesn’t stop at novelty items. The .CR domain listed above was briefly diverting users to another domain (thepiratebay.ee) which demands anything from $4 to £4 for users to access torrents – AVOID.

Update: The .ee domain removed the paywall, but it’s still nothing more than a mirror without new content.

Spotted any other Pirate Bay scams? Please let us know.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.